National Magazine Ranks Tampa Bay Area Public High Schools

By JON WILSON, Consulting Editor, TB Reporter

Twelve schools made U.S. News & World Report‘s statewide rankings for Florida.

Twelve Tampa Bay area public high schools won statewide rankings in a national news magazine’s recent survey, with Pine View School in Sarasota County earning a No. 1 state ranking and a No. 7 nationally.

The U.S. News & World Report’s state rankings also included another Sarasota County school, plus six from Hillsborough County and four from Pasco County.

U.S. News teamed with North Carolina-based RTI International, a global nonprofit social science research firm. The principles behind the rankings were these, according to the magazine’s web site: that a great high school must serve all of its students well, not just those who are college bound, and that it must be able to produce measurable academic outcomes to show it is successfully educating its student body across a range of performance indicators.

Then, a four-step process determined the best high schools. Said the U.S. News web site: “The first three steps ensured that the schools serve all of their students well, using their performance on the math and reading parts of their state proficiency tests and graduation rates as the benchmarks. For those schools that made it past the first three steps, a fourth step assessed the degree to which schools prepare students for college-level work.”